8/7/2019 Of All the Moons to Venture Out On

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Avril Thurman

Of All the Moons to Venture Out On

Woodchuck shavings were a disappointment, we were out for the Beaver Moon. Our tiny 

Boat tipsy with the tremblings of aDumptruck on trash morning , each star a mighty Mote in the big black.

Manifesto, little star,Decaying, dying, or whatever you are. A speck of dust on glass, a fleck of basil inPesto, one grain of salt in a salt mine,Delaying the inevitable dinner table shake, the white dwarfing.

Bleaching, whiting, erasing against the sky, we are back down here:Wardens of our tiny, stupid dinghy wishing some semblance of rodent was withinReach. The darkness feels dumb, even the water smells

Foreign. We are no

Flotilla, we are two damp weirdos in a too-small skiff without aNickel to our names. We whisper unnecessary and our mouths move like the fleeing inGodzilla movies. The smell makes us know we are in a swamp, somewhere between aPickle and old mud.

Screaming insects, crickets laugh at our laying-in-wait.Ghost fog on the water,Streaming in thin trails like cigarette smoke, my neck aHost for some kind of mosquito mockery. I can feel the air in my mouth, a film on my teeth.

And me without my 

Toothbrush. Floating stupid silent, the water a window. And me without aBrick. Even the slightestWhoosh of bored breeze would excite me. TheFlick of one mushy cattail against another.

Intubatation sounds more appealing than this beaverless night. Then, an infinitesimalUndulation, a ripple on the water. It is only a fallen cattail. It looks like soggy, friedOkra. Back to still. The air feels as strange as purple, and even in the dark, the mud is stillOchre on the bottom of a boot.

8/7/2019 Of All the Moons to Venture Out On

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On Of All the Moons to Venture Out On:

(Heh, heh: “On…On”)

Good googa mooga, did I struggle with this poem. And I fear the sing-songy-ness(sogginess) of end rhymes. I started by transferring the list of words from my classnotebook to a Word document, just listing them. Word auto-capitalized each word, so I leftit that way, at first, just to get this list down. I then looked at it, and wondered if I could flipthis bouts -rimes  into a “rhymed front” instead of a “rhymed end”. I began to write aroundthem, to avoid the dreaded end-rhyme, and did my best to devise an “occasion”.

I guess starting from “woodchuck” made me think of like creatures. I remembered theBeaver Moon (a full moon in November that is alleged to spring beavers into action) Wow,that sentence was not supposed to sound like an innuendo)). Anyway, the little beasts aresupposed to get in a frenzy of winter preparation during this full moon. As a kid, my mothertook my sisters and me out in the woods one night to see of it would happen. (She’s a

naturalist, so this is actually quite normal.) Us kiddos were complaining and bored andwaiting, until…a ruckus of tail-slapping and splashing and chattering and general mayhembroke out on the water! We couldn’t see too much, but it was one of the most bizarre thingsI’ve ever experienced. So, I tied it into the poem (having begun with a bizarre list of words),but minus the payoff.

It is as if some adults went back to recapture that odd night, but ended up sitting around in aboat, just waiting. Stagnation. Distraction. Observation of everything but what you hope toobserve. Letting your mind wander to outer space, to salt mines, to pesto. Thinking of absolutely anything else you could be doing. The sheer absurdity of why you are even outthere in the first place. This poem is floating in the dark, wanting something to happen.

(I’d appreciate input on how it is lined. I fussed and tinkered with it, but went back the“front rhymes” I started with.)